I've been reading these forums for the last few months everyday and decided to post for the first time. I recently purchased one of the D600 kit deals, and picked up a Nikon 85mm 1.8g to go with it. These are my first images with it. Only light tweaks and retouches made to the images. I'm still learning!

Thanks for the comments! Numbers 1 and 2 were outdoors and planned, but the other three were just quick snaps at gatherings in really terrible lighting: 3 is in mixed lighting with daylight, fluorescent, and halogen bulbs in a living room. 4 and 5 were on a back porch at night with just two over head fluorescent bulbs. The D600 was really close with AWB in each case.

With my D5000, I never could get what I felt were good skin tones and color out of camera. It took quite a bit of work in post. Needless to say, I'm thrilled with the D600 as an upgrade. Hopefully I will take more photos as I can spend less time getting them right in post. I'm just sad that my D5000's aperture control lever broke on Christmas Eve. I was hoping to keep it as a second body. It made me thankful I ordered the D600 when I did.

Now to keep working on my control of DOF and accurate focus on the eyes in portraits...

Lovely shots, to be sure. Given your description of your kit and what I assume was probably your experimentation strategy, a few thoughts:

1) The shallow depth of field possible with fast lenses and close proximity can be intoxicating and draw us to extremes.
2) Considering the half inch to two inch DOF you were creating, you did a remarkable job keeping eyes in focus. Really well done.
3) Lenses are rarely at their best at aperture extremes. Optical and physics compromises are inevitable. Thus the oft heard mantra: try to avoid shooting wide open.
4) Summarily and more to the point, pretty much all these shots, to my eye, if stopped down a bit more would have had plenty sufficient background blur and captured a little more of the subject in focus.

Thatís largely an artistic decision and Iím not second guessing your personal preference. This is just an observation that lenses do have ideal ranges they perform best in and can still yield the sense of depth you were seemingly after.

Thanks for the tips, Chuck. I've been playing with the DOF quite a bit lately to learn more quickly. I definitely understand the stopping down for greater DOF. Coming from a D5000 and kit system which wasn't capable of such shallow DOF, it'll take some practice for me to understand the actual working relationship between aperture, subject distance, background distance, and DOF on this combo, to see it in my mind before the capture, and then to estimate the resulting image. Sometimes it can be hard to judge the actual result just from the camera's screen, even when zoomed in. I've been shooting relatively wide open to understand the DOF, and now have been playing with apertures between 1.8-10 to see the results.

1. Was shot at f/2.5
2. f/2.8
3, 4 - f/1.8
5 - f/2.0

With these coming within the first 300 shutter actuations (and the first few shots of people I've taken), I'm quite pleased with the initial images.

Thanks for the tips. Looking forward to my next trip to NOLA. There would be some fun places to shoot.

Thanks for the kind words, Jeff. And yes, I totally get where you are with it all. Again, probably the most important concept is the resolution quality variations that can occur. It's easy to perform methodical tests with still life at home to really see the aperture impact.

I had just put a DOF calculator on my smartphone. This website looks like it's a great tool to get an understanding of the relationship before firing the shot. For example:

With the 85mm shot wide open at f/1.8 and a subject distance of 10 feet, the depth of field is roughly 5-6". Most of these shots were probably at that distance, hence the reason they are less than perfect. By 2.8, the depth of field is 8.3", and by 5.6 it's 16".

Lovely shots, to be sure. Given your description of your kit and what I assume was probably your experimentation strategy, a few thoughts:

1) The shallow depth of field possible with fast lenses and close proximity can be intoxicating and draw us to extremes.
2) Considering the half inch to two inch DOF you were creating, you did a remarkable job keeping eyes in focus. Really well done.
3) Lenses are rarely at their best at aperture extremes. Optical and physics compromises are inevitable. Thus the oft heard mantra: try to avoid shooting wide open.
4) Summarily and more to the point, pretty much all these shots, to my eye, if stopped down a bit more would have had plenty sufficient background blur and captured a little more of the subject in focus.

Thatís largely an artistic decision and Iím not second guessing your personal preference. This is just an observation that lenses do have ideal ranges they perform best in and can still yield the sense of depth you were seemingly after.

Sweeeeet, Jeff. To my eye at least (regarding DOF and nailing the focus point) best of the bunch.

Both eyes and most of the face are razor sharp - most of the hair is reasonably sharp - slight softness to the ears. Again, to my eye, when in pursuit of shallow DOF, this is pretty much as far as it should be pushed.